The World Made for Man

Since providence is now agreed on, the next thing is to show whether we should believe that it belongs to many, or rather to one only. I taught well enough, I think, in my Institutes that there cannot be many gods; because if the divine force and power are shared out among several, they must necessarily be reduced. And what is reduced is plainly mortal; but if God is not mortal, he can neither be reduced nor divided. So there is one God, in whom complete force and power can neither be lessened nor increased. If there are many, then while each of them separately has some part of power and authority, the sum itself shrinks; and none of them separately will be able to hold the whole, which he holds in common with the others. Each will lack exactly as much as the rest possess. [a]

There cannot, then, be many rulers in this world, or many masters in one house, or many pilots on one ship, or many leaders of one herd or flock, or many queens in one swarm of bees. And there could not have been many suns in the sky, any more than there are several souls in one body — so completely does the whole of nature agree in being one. But if the world

then it is clear, on the poet’s own testimony, that there is one God who lives in the world, since a whole body cannot be inhabited and governed except by one mind. All divine power must therefore be in one person, by whose will and command everything is ruled; and he is accordingly so great that no one can describe him in words or take his measure with the senses.

Where, then, did people get this opinion — this conviction — that there are many gods? Beyond doubt, all those who are worshiped as gods were men, and were also the earliest and greatest kings. And who does not know that they were invested with divine honors after death, either for some virtue by which they had done the human race good, or because they had won undying memory by the benefits and the inventions with which they had adorned human life? And not only men, but women too. Both the most ancient writers of Greece, whom they call theologi, teach this, and the Roman writers who follow and imitate the Greeks — above all Euhemerus and our own Ennius, who set out the birthdays, the marriages, the children, the reigns, the exploits, the deaths and the tombs of every one of them.

Tullius, following them, demolished the public religions in his third book On the Nature of the Gods; but neither he nor anyone else was able to bring in the true one, since he did not know it. So he himself testified that what was false was plain to see, while the truth stayed hidden. He says:

“I only wish that I could discover true things as easily as I can refute false ones.”

He said this not as an Academic keeping up a pose, but truly, and as he really felt, because the truth cannot be rooted out of human perception. What human foresight was able to reach, he reached: he was able to expose what was false. For anything invented and false is easily destroyed, since no reason holds it up. There is therefore one God, the source and origin of all things, as Plato both felt and taught in the Timaeus, whose majesty he declares to be so great that the mind cannot take it in and the tongue cannot say it.

Hermes gives the same testimony — the one Cicero says the Egyptians count among their gods. I mean the man who, for his excellence and his knowledge of many arts, was called Trismegistus, and who was far older not only than Plato but than Pythagoras and the seven wise men. In Xenophon, Socrates says in the course of conversation that the form of God ought not to be inquired into; and Plato, in his book of Laws, says:

“What God is ought not to be asked, because it can neither be found out nor told.”

Pythagoras too admits that there is only one God, saying that there is a mind without a body which, spread and stretched through all of nature, gives living perception to every living creature. Antisthenes, in his Physics, said that there is only one natural God, although the nations and the cities have gods of their own. Aristotle and his followers the Peripatetics, and Zeno and his followers the Stoics, say much the same.

It would be a long task to follow up the opinions of every one of them separately. Though they used different names, they nevertheless agreed on one power that governs the world. And yet, though philosophers and poets — and, for that matter, the worshipers of the gods — often acknowledge the supreme God, no one ever inquired into, and no one ever discussed, how he is to be worshiped and honored. They were convinced, always believing him generous and beyond corruption, that he is angry with no one and needs no worship from anyone. And so there can be no religion where there is no fear.

Now that we have answered the godless and detestable wisdom — the senselessness, rather — of certain people, let us come back to the subject we set ourselves. We have said that if religion is taken away, neither wisdom nor justice can be kept. Wisdom, because the understanding of the divine nature, the thing in which we differ from the animals, is found in man alone. Justice, because unless God, who cannot be deceived, holds our desires in check, we will live wickedly and without reverence. So the fact that our actions are watched by God matters not only for the usefulness of common life but for truth itself; because if religion and justice are taken away, we lose our reason and sink either to the stupidity of cattle or to the savagery of wild animals — worse than they are, in fact, since the beasts spare their own kind. [h]

What will be more savage, what more merciless, than a man, if the fear of a higher power is taken away and he is able either to slip past the notice of the laws or to despise their force? It is the fear of God alone, then, that guards the common society of men, by which life itself is held up, protected and governed. But that fear is taken away if a man is persuaded that God is without anger — whereas both the common good and reason itself and truth persuade us that he is moved and indignant when unjust things are done. We must go back once more to what came before, so that, having taught that the world was made by God, we may teach why it was made.

If anyone considers the whole government of the world, he will certainly understand how true the Stoics’ opinion is when they say that the world was made on our account. Everything the world is made of, and everything it produces out of itself, is fitted to the use of man. A man uses fire for warmth and light, for softening his food and for working iron; springs for drinking and for baths; rivers for watering fields and for marking the boundaries of countries; the earth for taking in all sorts of crops, the hills for planting vines, the mountains for timber and firewood, the plains for fields of grain; the sea not only for trade and for supplies brought in from distant countries, but also for fish of every kind in abundance. [i]

But if he makes use of these elements nearest to him, there is no doubt that he uses the sky as well, since even the duties of the heavenly bodies are regulated for the fruitfulness of the earth we live from. The sun, with its ceaseless courses and its unequal laps, completes its yearly circuits, and either draws out the day for work at its rising or brings on the night for rest at its setting. At one time by going farther off toward the south, at another by coming nearer toward the north, it causes the turns of winter and summer, so that by winter’s wet and frost the earth is enriched for bearing, and by summer’s heat either the grass crop is hardened into ripeness, or what stands in wet ground is steamed and warmed until it ripens.

The moon, too, which governs the time of night, regulates her monthly courses by losing and recovering her light by turns, and by the brightness of her shining lights up nights darkened with gloom, so that journeys in the summer heat, and marches, and work, can be carried out without labor and inconvenience — since

The other heavenly bodies also, whether rising or setting, supply favorable seasons by their fixed stations. What is more, they give guidance to ships, so that they may not wander over the boundless deep on an uncertain course, since the pilot who observes them properly reaches the harbor on the shore he is steering for. Clouds are drawn on by the breath of the winds, so that the fields of sown grain may be watered with showers, the vines may be loaded with fruit and the trees with their crop. And all this is put on show in a succession of changes throughout the year, so that nothing may ever be lacking by which the life of men is sustained.

But (it is said) the same earth feeds the other living creatures too, and by the produce of that same earth even the dumb animals are fed. Has God then labored for the sake of the dumb animals as well? Not at all — because they are without reason. On the contrary, we understand that these creatures too were made in the same way by God for the use of man: some for food, some for clothing, some to help him in his work. So it is plain that the divine providence meant to furnish and adorn the life of men with an abundance of things and resources, and that this is why he filled the air with birds, the sea with fish, and the earth with four-footed animals.

But the Academics, arguing against the Stoics, regularly ask why, if God made everything for the sake of men, many things are found that are actually against us, and hostile, and harmful, in the sea as well as on the land. And the Stoics, with no regard for the truth, fought this off in the silliest way. They say that among the things that grow, and among the creatures counted as animals, there are many whose usefulness has escaped notice so far, but that it is discovered in the course of time, just as necessity and use have already discovered many things that earlier ages did not know.

What use, then, can be discovered in mice, in beetles, in snakes, which are a nuisance and a danger to man? Is some medicine hidden in them? If there is any, it will be found out one day — as a remedy, that is, against evils, whereas the complaint is that they are altogether evil. They say that a viper, burnt and reduced to ashes, is a remedy for the bite of the same creature. How much better it would have been for it not to exist at all than for a remedy against it to be needed, and drawn out of the creature itself.

They might have answered more briefly, and more truly, like this. When God had formed man as a kind of image of himself — the finishing piece of his workmanship — he breathed wisdom into him alone, so that he might bring everything under his own authority and government and make use of all the advantages of the world. And yet he set both good things and evil things before him, precisely because he gave him wisdom, whose whole business is telling evil things and good things apart. No one can choose the better things, or know what is good, unless he also knows how to reject and avoid what is evil. The two are bound up with each other, so that if one is taken away the other must go with it.

So it is with good and evil set before it that wisdom at last does its work: it wants the good because it is useful, and rejects the evil for safety’s sake. Just as countless good things have been given for it to enjoy, so evils have been given as well, for it to guard against. If there is no evil and no danger — nothing, in short, that can harm a man — then all the material of wisdom is taken away, and man will have no need of it. If only good things are set in front of him, what need is there of reflection, of understanding, of knowledge, of reason? Wherever he stretches out his hand, the thing will suit him and fit his nature.

Suppose someone wanted to set the most exquisite dinner in front of infants who have no taste yet. Plainly each will want whatever impulse, or hunger, or even accident draws him toward, and whatever he takes will be useful to him and do him good. What loss would it be to them, then, always to stay as they are — always infants, and knowing nothing of the world? But add a mixture of things bitter, or useless, or even poisonous, and they are plainly deceived by their ignorance of good and evil, unless wisdom is added to them, by which they may reject the bad and choose the good.

You see, then, that we have all the more need of wisdom because of evils, and that unless these things had been set before us we would not be a rational animal. And if this account is true — and the Stoics were in no way able to see it — then that argument of Epicurus is also disposed of. God, he says, either wants to take evils away and cannot; or he can and does not want to; or he neither wants to nor can; or he both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak, which does not fit the character of God. If he can and does not want to, he is grudging, which is equally foreign to God. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both grudging and weak, and therefore not God. If he both wants to and can, which alone suits God, then where do evils come from? Or why does he not remove them?

I know that many of the philosophers who defend providence are regularly shaken by this argument, and are almost driven against their will to admit that God takes no interest in anything, which is exactly what Epicurus is aiming at. But once the matter has been examined, we easily dispose of this formidable argument. God is able to do whatever he wishes, and there is no weakness and no grudging in God. He is able, then, to take evils away; but he does not wish to, and he is not grudging on that account. He does not take them away because at the same time he gives wisdom, as I have shown, and there is more of goodness and pleasure in wisdom than there is of annoyance in evils. For wisdom even makes us know God, and by that knowledge attain immortality, which is the highest good.

So unless we first know evil, we will not be able to know good. Epicurus did not see this, and neither did anyone else: that if evils are taken away, wisdom is taken away in the same stroke, and no trace of virtue is left in a man, whose virtue consists in bearing and overcoming the bitterness of evils. And so, for the sake of the slight profit of having evils removed, we would be robbed of a good that is very great, and true, and our own. It is plain, then, that everything is set before us for the sake of man — the evils just as much as the good things.

It follows that I should show for what purpose God made man himself. Just as he contrived the world for the sake of man, so he formed man on his own account, as a kind of priest of a divine temple, a spectator of his works and of the things of heaven. Man is the only creature who, since he is intelligent and capable of reason, is able to understand God, to admire his works, and to perceive his force and power; and it is for this that he is furnished with judgment, intelligence and foresight. [p]

It is for this that he alone, beyond the other living creatures, has been made with an upright body and bearing, so that he seems to have been raised up for the contemplation of his Parent. It is for this that he alone has received speech, and a tongue to interpret his thought, so that he may be able to declare the majesty of his Lord. And last of all, this is why everything was placed under his control: so that he himself might be under the control of God, their Maker and Creator.

If, then, God meant man to be a worshiper of himself, and gave him so much honor on that account that he should rule over everything, it is plainly most just that he should worship the one who gave him such great gifts, and should love his fellow man, who is joined with us in sharing the divine justice. It is not right that a worshiper of God should be injured by a worshiper of God. From this it is understood that man was made for the sake of religion and justice.

Marcus Tullius is a witness on this matter, in his books On the Laws, where he speaks like this:

“But of all the matters that learned men dispute, nothing is of greater consequence than that it should be thoroughly understood that we are born for justice.”

And if this is perfectly true, it follows that God wants all men to be just — that is, to have God and man as the objects of their love: to honor God truly as a Father, and to love man as a brother. In these two things the whole of justice is contained. But the man who either fails to acknowledge God or does harm to his fellow man lives unjustly and against his own nature, and in this way throws the divine institution and law into disorder.